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chaotic13 said:
I thought I had everything under control and out of sight from others. That is until my kids came along and my marriage started to fall apart. Then my world started to unravel.

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Oh, that is so true! It takes a while for those things to catch up, doesn't it? I've no children, but I guess being in my late '30s is the time for all this stuff to come bubbling up. Chaotic, your image of the chick straining for food is resonating with me right now. It looks so helpless and desperate and kind of angry too.

I think there's something to the theory that we try to re-create our families in our adulthood, that we are drawn to people we feel instinctively will 'fix' the perceived wrongs of the past. So we end up in relationships that somehow are supposed to heal us. That this can take so many different forms is what's scary, in the sense of there being so many aspects to the whole tangled thing.

I'm sick of thinking about my parents, and just want finally to see them as two people who were young and unformed once and had kids and now they deserve my respect, end of story. But, damn it, the whole thing just won't go away. So many (all?) my roles and mechanisms come from my family
relationships and I guess I have to make my peace with them for real, and not just decide that I'm grown up now and can take responsilbilty for myself. That's what I decided years ago, but it's like that decision was taken before I had worked it out, whatever that means, and now I'm reaping the benefits (erg) of that again.

It just goes on, doesn't it.